How are providers merged, deduplicated, and prioritized?

Discussion
1

Background – the weird behaviour I saw which led to my question:

I have two providers set up, local and Jellyfin. All my files are tagged with metadata from musicbrainz. Both providers had been synced.

I usually browse by album artist. I noticed today that not all albums I have for artist A were appearing; I was seeing only the subset of albums which were on the local device. It was showing that the provider for them was local device, too. If I went to artist B which only exists on Jellyfin, I was seeing their albums, provided by Jellyfin, so I know it is capable of reading music from both.

I then browsed by folder to artist A on Jellyfin and see all the albums. Then I browsed by album artist to artist A again and now I see all their albums, and all of them (including the ones which exist on the local device too) are showing as being provided by Jellyfin.

My question:

How are providers merged, deduplicated, and prioritized?

Ideally it would deduplicate so I don’t see albums I have in both providers twice (it seems to be doing this).

Ideally it would merge everything I have from both providers so I can see everything, whether it’s unique to one provider or shared between both (it’s unclear whether this is happening properly – as noted above I saw some albums missing).

Ideally it would prioritize the local device as the audio data source if the song exists there, to save data and transcoding (it appears this is not happening, given that it is showing Jellyfin as provider of common files).

My free trial is about to run out and at the moment I’m unsure whether to buy.

2

They are not merged as can’t. If you want an offline copy of the Jellyfin data you use the offline features that are built for that and will priorize the cache when necessary.

3

What do you mean, “can’t”? I don’t think that aligns with what I saw in the app.

What if provider A has things for artist Alpha but nothing for artist Beta, and provider B has things for artist Beta but not artist Alpha? Will I see only Alpha or Beta but not both in the library? Which of the two will I see and why?

Then if provider A has artist Gamma’s album X but no album Y, and provider B has artist Gamma’s album Y but not album X, what will I see for Gamma in the library?

4

There’s is no artist / albums merging, if you have the same artist on both devices it will be present twice.